


Matron: Ascend

by HestiasHearth



Series: Turpentine and Patches [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Culling (Homestuck), Gen, not as in the action but many references thereto, that means references to infant death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 04:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15856638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: 1. Your duty is to protect the Alternian people, to in that process keep a watchful eye to weaknesses in your race.2. This grub is a weakness in your race.3. This grub is the Alternian people.4. Your name is UNIMPORTANT, you are all sisters here anyhow, and you are faced for the first time with the fairly obvious fact that your line of work presents a moral conundrum.





	Matron: Ascend

**Author's Note:**

> crossposted on tumblr by [rhythmic-idealist](https://rhythmic-idealist.tumblr.com/post/177603401411/your-duty-is-to-protect-the-alternian-people-to).
> 
> Credit goes to the wonderful [toastyhat](https://toastyhat.tumblr.com)/[HeatedHeadwear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/HeatedHeadwear) and her No Red Sweaters series for giving us the word "Allmother."

  1. Your duty is to protect the Alternian people, to in that process keep a watchful eye to weaknesses in your race.
  2. This grub is a weakness in your race.
  3. This grub is the Alternian people.
  4. Your name is UNIMPORTANT, you are all sisters anyhow, and you are faced for the first time with the fairly obvious fact that your line of work presents a moral conundrum.



Maybe it’s because you’re making the decision aboveground, errands-containment textile prism slung over your elbow, thinkpan still a little clearer from the sunlight that, a little over an hour ago, had shone on your skin.

Maybe it’s because of the fairly jarring and unique situation of following a shooting star to its serendipitously close landing point, and finding a grub who, while by all means sickly, underdeveloped, and baring a glaring hemotype aberration, survived the impact.

For whichever reason, you look at this grub and cannot help but see a person, and one for which you feel an instant, uncomfortably familiar affinity, and you, Porrim Maryam, are faced with a dilemma.

If you bring it back to the caverns, it will die.

If you leave it here, it will die.

If you give it everything you have, smuggle it back to the caverns and through the Trials, keep it fed and watered and watch its every step - under the guise of some sort of research, understanding steps to be taken in future iterations of the FF mutation (as you’ve just named it, in your head, to give this idea credibility) - if you are successful in all of this, and not branded heretical or insubordinate for trying, it will reach the end, and there will be no lusus, and it will die.

“Kamill.”

Allmother fucking dammit, you’ve named the thing.

The part of you which you have grown to dislike reeeeels you back to reality, and the part of you that dislikes her pouts, unfurls a ponytail you no longer have, rolls the waistband of her skirt up an inch shorter, but you, with your actual body, right now, do none of those things, and Porrim The Adult keeps talking. This is not a choose your own adventure. This is not a question the world has given you the wisdom nor the authority to answer. That’s why the world has just given you answers, and you’ve studied this one: once, between the eyes, and snap its neck for good measure.

Your sign is engraved on the side of your culling knife in the shaky but artistic hand with which you first held it when you were seven, the night before Ordeals.

Its forelegs are too short and its translucent exoskeleton underdeveloped, aberrant blood showing through brighter in some patches and darker in others.

“You don’t understand that I am talking to you.”

You are fairly certain, as you sit in front of the thing, that this is true. Your first distinguishable memories place you distinctly post-pupation, though if you focus, you can dredge up colorful, dizzying views of a time you were much too small to be a wriggler, either half-imagined or carried over hazily, but, as all of your schoolfeeding tapes confirm, there was no sign of language or organized thought there. Even the grubs that do face their Trials like proper Alternians do so haphazardly, failing to understand until their second or third or twenty-fifth try that the thing they are biting contains no food, or it if does, may be the kind of food that bites back.

The grub rubs its hind legs over and over each other like it thinks it’s a chirpgrub, an experiment through which it accomplishes absolutely nothing, because grubs are stupid and you generally can not fault them for this. It has also done you the inconvenience of moving to look an awful lot like it’s inclining its head toward your voice.

It probably thinks you, too, are some kind of food. Stranded out here without so much as egg fragments to be seen, the thing must be starving.

Something in your is chest chained firmly to this patch of ground. The sky is heavier around you, and sticky on your shoulders in a way it shouldn’t be able to be in the driest parts of the dark season. It is stupid, and it is going to live and die in a night, or a night and a day if by some miracle it finds its way to shade, which is not the kind of miracle Alternia’s messiahs work, and looking at the brightness behind its eyes you think of how vastly _unfair_ it all is.

That’s not Porrim The Adult talking!

You’ve stood abruptly and are three steps away when you become aware you’ve moved.

You turn, you look toward the sky in front of you instead, and keep walking, the now-chilling night air on your face.

...

It is a full minute’s walk away before you turn and sprint back and already you are babbling, and bumbling, and apologizing. Something stings, and it occurs to you that those are your knees, where you’ve skinned them not quite to bleeding when you dropped against the sand.

You’re laughing, “You do not understand that I am talking to you!” because here and there you need the reminder that you are being a little bit silly, and sentimental, and oh, you have not felt this way in a long, long while.

You have not _felt_ in an awfully long time.

No, that’s untrue. You don’t know what an awfully long time is yet. “Porrim The Adult,” and yet her eyes are still mottled and skin is still wiggler-grey and scraped near bleeding from a brief tussle with the sand. But you haven’t felt in a while. It’s like breaching the surface of a touchless grey molasses and remembering the way air is supposed to scrape the inside of your lungs, like you feet have abruptly found land again and now, of course, the next step is to stand.

Each bone and muscle moves with such a shocking kind of solidness that you wonder what else you haven’t been feeling.

It’s... stupid, you realize with a sudden, uncomfortable jolt of common sense, that this is a dilemma.

...

The grub gains several things this night, aside from, presumably, its first breaths:

  1. A handmade hammock, that sits around your shoulder and down to your waist, made of a fabric that is so, so much to sheer to carry something as heretical as this.
  2. A good mouthful of your hair, when you first try to move it.
  3. An all kinds of heretical unofficial name, and a shot at survival, but that of course has been discussed.
  4. A... friend? You aren’t sure friendship is a disease grubs are known to transmit.



Your symbol is engraved on the side of your culling knife in the shaky but artistic hand with which you first held it when you were seven, the night before Ordeals, and you polish every scrap of blood and stain off of it and scrape at imperfections you left with a sharp-edged stone and fall asleep sobbing, doubled over on your knees, under a crossing trestle.


End file.
